AI Algorithm Identifies Humorous Pictures

Humor is a uniquely human quality. Most people can recognize funny sentences, incidents, pictures, videos, and so on. But it is not always easy to say why these things are humorous. So it’s easy to imagine that humor will be one of the last bastions that separates humans from machines. Computers, the thinking goes, cannot possibly develop a sense of humor until they can grasp the subtleties of our rich social and cultural settings. And even the most powerful AI machines are surely a long way from that. That thinking may soon have to change. Today, Arjun Chandrasekaran from Virginia Tech and pals say they’ve trained a machine-learning algorithm to recognize humorous scenes and even to create them. They say their machine can accurately predict when a scene is funny…